Pioneers will not only adapt to shifting needs; they will also proactively shape perceived needs and outcomes through innovation, education, and promotional activities.
What practical measures can companies take to sense, exploit, and shape the post-COVID-19 reality? We suggest eight steps:
1. Expect change and look ahead. Organizations tend to become myopic and insular when under threat. The key questions become, what next, and with what consequences and opportunities?
2. Understand broader social shifts. Addressable opportunities are often born out of new customer needs and frustrations, so listening to customers is vital. Companies need to look more broadly at how social attitudes are shifting to understand which observed changes in behavior and consumption could be lasting.
3. Scrutinize granular, high-frequency data. Aggregates, averages, and episodic statistical data will not reveal the weak signals of change. Companies need to access and analyze high-frequency data, such as data on credit card transactions, at a very granular level in order to spot emerging trends.
4. Identify your own revealed weaknesses. The crisis will undoubtedly expose needs for greater preparedness, resilience, agility, or leanness in different parts of your company. Those weaknesses also signal opportunities to renew your products and business model and serve customers better. Work to understand broader customer needs.
5. Study regions further ahead in the crisis. A geographical fast-follower strategy may be available to agile players.
6. Scan for maverick activity. Some companies, often smaller players on the edges of your industry, will be making bets predicated on new customer needs or behavioral patterns. Ask yourself, who are these mavericks, and which potential branches and leaves on the tree of possible shifts are they betting on? Are those bets gaining traction? What are you missing? From there, you can decide on the appropriate response to each opportunity or threat: ignore, investigate further, create an option to play, replicate and exceed, buy the maverick, or act with high priority.
7. Look at which new patterns reduce friction. Frictions are unnecessary delays, costs, complexities, mismatches with needs, or other inconveniences that a customer experiences in using a particular offering. High-friction areas are also ones where it is logical for mavericks to innovate and where they are more likely to succeed.
8. Maintain hope and a growth orientation. It’s almost inevitable that we will face a deep postcrisis recession. This is not a reason to postpone innovation and investment. Create value through differential growth. The evidence is clear: the best time to grow differentially is when aggregate growth is low. “Flourishers” in a downturn do reduce costs to maintain viability, but they also innovate around new opportunities, and they reinvest in growth pillars in order to capture opportunity in adversity and shape the postcrisis future.
Source: BCG